What are the panel's recommendations for books on design of experiments?

Ideally, books should be still in print or available electronically, although that may not always be feasible. If you feel moved to add a few words on what's so good about the book that would be great too.

Also, aim for one book per answer so that voting can help sort the suggestions.

I had a look at this, and it's perfectly fine but has a bit too much of the feel of an undergraduate text book for my tastes. Not that there's anything wrong with that...
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walkytalkyAug 27 '10 at 9:44

1

Very nice book indeed! I've started long ago to reproduce his analysis (with Design Expert and SAS) using R, but never find time to finish it. If you like to check it out, aliquote.org/articles/tech/dae
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chl♦Aug 27 '10 at 11:17

Ronald Fisher's The Design of Experiments (link is Wikipedia rather than Amazon since it is long out of print) is interesting for historical context. The book is often credited as founding the whole field, and certainly did a lot to promote things like blocking, randomisation and factorial design, though things have moved on a bit since.

As a period document it's quite fascinating, but it's also maddening. In the absence of a common terminology and notation, a lot of time is spent painstakingly explaining things in what now seems comically-stilted English. If you had to use it as a reference to look up how to calculate something you'd probably gnaw your own leg off. But the terribly polite hatchet job on some of Galton's analysis is entertaining.

(I know, I know -- how the readers of tomorrow will laugh at the archaisms of today's scientific literature...)

I'm only a couple of chapters in, so not yet in a position to recommend confidently, but so far it looks like a good graduate text, reasonably detailed, comprehensive and up-to-date. Has more of a "no nonsense" feel than the Montgomery.